The_Admiral

It's a podcast, there are no rules. Why not just make them separate episodes?

You shouldn't be able to get three banners out of a second-round out.

On 10/8/2018 at 1:06 PM, San Diego said:

Divisional banners are so lame. Championship or nothing imo. 

Disagree. As much as I'm sworn to hate the Red Wings, the rafters of the Joe looked really special being filled with all those Red Wings banners.

Piss Sharks

I had a post in the NHL season changes thread about the Met Center seats and it led me down a '91 North Stars rabbit hole. Behold!

https://nathangabay.com/how-bobby-clarke-almost-drafted-himself-the-1991-expansion-draft/

Quote

 

Just when we seemed to run out of insulting material about the National Hockey League, it decided to hold an expansion draft.

High jinks ensued. The NHL computer spewed out a list of unprotected players that read like a Legends of Hockey team – Jean Beliveau, Yvan Cournoyer, John Ferguson, Bobby Clarke, Ken Dryden, Bob Gainey, Bernie Federko, Brian Sutter . . .

What happened?

The NHL’s New York office called it a computer glitch, but the Montreal office said those players who never filed their retirement papers were actually eligible for the draft, even though many now are grandfathers.

Whatever the case, the list, circulated nationally by the wire services, gave hockey fans another hearty laugh at league expense.

This goofy development was simply more harmless fun provided by a league run by clowns.

Gordon, Jeff. “NHL Discovers Another Way To Get Laughs.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch: 30 May 1991. 1D. Print.

 

The NHL's Apple IIe crashed and put Jean Beliveau in the expansion draft, and so the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was doing an OITGDNHL thread in 1991. Time, like a hockey puck, really is a flat circle.

Andy Cohen is running arena dates?

45 minutes ago, Ice_Cap said:

Chicago, Detroit, Minnesota, St. Louis, and Toronto would be my dream division. 

+ Winnipeg, which is more at home with Chicago and the Twin Cities than points west.

There we go, that makes sense. Albuquerque carried Bears games for many years because of Brian Urlacher. But the weirdest case of favorite-son coverage was when Darin Erstad led a radio station in small-town North Dakota to carry the Angels. I don't think there have been many cases of single players extending radio networks, and certainly not players of such modest renown as Darin Erstad. Mike Trout, I'd get, but.

Wonder why Cape Girardeau picked up the Rams game when even St. Louis picked up Vikings-Eagles. Does McCall play for the Rams?

EDIT: to be more and also less precise, that is actually the Paducah-Cape Girardeau-Harrisburg-Mt Vernon television market.

Oilers off to an encouraging start with a big victory against dividing by zero

It looks like the Chicago Wolves are winding down their once-comprehensive television coverage, as outside of Milwaukee and Rockford, no road games will be televised. (Inside of Milwaukee and Rockford, everyone's too drunk to read.) Admittedly, my chief concern is keeping tabs on the Frost Swine, so that's still there, but I appreciated having Wolves games around when nothing else was on, and I feel bad for people who cared enough about the Wolves to keep up with the road games. But at least parking is free this year after years of usurious Rosemont parking rates, so I might actually go to a game or two this year.

Your Northwest+Pacific and Southwest+Central are probably going to be the way the divisions shake out if we keep four, with Arizona getting kicked to the Central and precious little regard for MUH TIME ZONES there. Your Northeast and Lake Erie could go together as one division, too, if we're gonna tell Pittsburgh they can't play with their friends anymore like we did for a few years in the '90s when they got kicked out to make room for the Panthers. However, look how easily you could flip them with Quebec City.

I can't decide whether my made-up word is pronounced "ky-OATZ-ian" or "kyo-TEE-zhen"

3 minutes ago, SFGiants58 said:

Don’t the Blues only exist because the Wirtz family wanted to unload the aged St. Louis Arena on some schmucks?

Yes, but St. Louis turned out to be a pretty solid hockey town in spite of the circumstances and their Coyotesian parade of broke owners.

The stupid thing about the wild cards is that it's a vestige of a realignment plan that kept the Red Wings in the Central at 15/15 but reduced out-of-division play to two games apiece, so you needed that equalizer to account for one division of the conference having seven teams and the other having eight. It doesn't serve a purpose under this alignment except to make things more complicated than they need to be.

Yes, the Blues have been a division rival for almost 40 years with some very ugly playoff series along the way, and if you separate them from the Blackhawks, then they've lost the Maple Leafs, North Stars, Red Wings, and Blues from the classic Norris Division, which is to say all of them. The Predators have become a nice little anal cyst, but beating Detroit and Toronto still feels the most important to me, with St. Louis third.

God damn it, all my post did was remind myself that the Blackhawks' #1 goalie is Cam Ward. Why did people try to ban me from this board when I've already been banned from a happy life?

4 hours ago, Still MIGHTY said:

Your super/major market thing means mostly nothing in the NHL. See Winnipeg's success last season and prospective success this season. See both the Rangers and Islanders probably missing the playoffs. See Chicago's last place finish last season. See Toronto's years of struggles. See Montreal's current struggle. Columbus has finally rounded into form thanks to competent management. "Your" Hurricanes have faltered because of bad management. That's what succeeds in the NHL. Good vs. Bad Management. The other stuff doesn't matter as much as it does in other sports.

Yes and no. It's not market size but rather market profile that gives outside-the-cap advantages to certain teams, whether that's income tax advantages or accommodating the delicate...shall we say "artistic temperaments" of Canadian hockey players. Chicago and Toronto are bigger than Dallas, and New York is bigger than all of them, but it's Dallas that's livin' life on easy mode. Then there's Tampa Bay, where the players practically pay the team to play there instead of the other way around. Winnipeg has been successful in recent years, but they've had to do it the hard way by virtually limiting their roster construction to Americans and Europeans who are cost-controlled and whose response to "how would you like to live in a terrible city of 800,000 where nothing ever happens and everyone cares dearly about your job" is not to run screaming from the room like their hair is on fire but "caring? about me? that sounds kinda cool."

The funny thing is that Carolina should have every sizable advantage that Dallas, Tampa, and Nashville have, but they've mostly pissed down their legs because they've been owned by a miserly weirdo who built a bathroom shrine to Cam Ward and then a predatory lender who's trying to disrupt hockey by figuring out a way not to buy sticks.

3 hours ago, McCarthy said:

People are complaining about Witten a lot and I agree with them, but I also find Joe Tessitore incredibly annoying. Like he's turned up to 11 on every play, losing his mind over unremarkable 3rd down conversions. It doesn't feel genuine and if it is genuine then I'm worried for his mental health. It's like he feels like he needs to cover for Witten and really you just need to call the game.

Did you read the profile of him on The Ringer? He's the most Scorsese-Sopranos Dad who ever lived.

The league should have been in Seattle years ago; the omission of the American Pacific Northwest from their footprint has been far more egregious than the Southeast they saw fit to cover so well. But I have a bad taste in my mouth over precisely what you said: that the NBA is what people really want, which I understand completely, and this would appear to get in the way of that. I'd rather have the Sonics back too if it came down to one or the other.

1 hour ago, Digby said:

Stoolies making a show of some Deadspin editor's 12-year-old comments is like some kind of dollar-store Gamergate, which is kind of an ironic turnabout considering the proponents this time are slacker lawyers and finance bros instead of underemployed gamers.

It's such a fool's errand. All these people at Deadspin, Barstool, and any internet publication with more readers than mikesthoughts.blogspot.com all grew up at the same time in the same place, which is early-2000s Something Awful, 4chan, and sundry Internet Wrestling Community forums. All these places operated on sort of a performance-art approach to writing that was all about playing an amplified version of yourself and competing to be the meanest and funniest to each other and to innocent bystanders. Petchesky was a 4chan guy, Jeb Lund was a SA/IWC guy, all the people who live in Brooklyn and do podcasts for $5 a month grew out of Something Awful and FOAD in specific. (I'm not an esteemed writer, but I grew up in that world, too.) The circa-2005 Deadspin comment section, where you had to audition to have your comments posted and only then be selected to join the elite and have your one-liners tacked underneath Drew Magary's poop jokes, was basically the East Coast prep school circuit of messageboarding. It's no surprise that communication-as-competition forum culture would go on to spawn so many writers, especially since most of them were already at good schools while they were screwing around like this, but they've all cut their teeth being what we've come to call in the last five or six years, Bad People. (It's always struck me as a very kindergarten construction: you're a Bad Person! And that's Not Okay!) So you're always going to find dirt on any of these people, but it's never really meaningful dirt, it's just verbal jousting for approval.

I don't think that Barry Petchesky is a monster for making fat jokes about women in Deadspin posts, nor do I think that Portnoy is some sort of monster for whatever it is he does. It's all just dumb competitive performance art. Pretending to be above it all, which Deadspin has been doing in its moral-scold iteration, is really the only losing play -- at least until everyone who grew up on those message boards ages out of the business and cedes it to the next generation that grew up on Tumblr drowning in feelings.

STDs flare up less persistently than Deadspin versus Barstool, they're back at it again

Okay, that's all true, now for the part where the White Sox have an owner who seems to thrive on discontent for him to mediate.

You blame Hawk for being a terrible GM, but acknowledge that he was in an untenable situation with a manager he didn't hire and didn't want, basically a precursor to Kenny Williams not hiring nor wanting Ozzie Guillen. There's a through-line here...

Hawk Harrelson retired after 35ish years of being bad at his job. Here's him breaking down in his last moments on air while Steve Stone just ignores him.